


Homecoming

by Kalya_Lee



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Gen, Healing, Spoilers for AoS Season 3, spoilers for Civil War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-06
Updated: 2016-08-06
Packaged: 2018-07-29 18:05:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7694185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kalya_Lee/pseuds/Kalya_Lee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Why do we lose things?” Wanda asks.<br/>Daisy drops her eyes. Her voice shakes. “Because we break things.”</p>
<p>Team Steve needs a safehouse. SHIELD has a secret base. It's a solution, in more ways than one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Homecoming

_“Why do we lose things?”_

_“I’m sorry?”_

_Wanda cocks her head, studies the girl in the room, on the couch, curled up small and into herself. Her hands are folded in her lap, fingers laced tight, knuckles going white. Wanda lays her own palms flat against her thighs; it’s easier, now, than it used to be._

_She tilts herself, in her chair, turns slowly toward the girl, like a flower searching for sun. “I said – “_

_“Yes,” the girl says. “I heard what you said.”_

_This girl: she is soft lines, gentle features – she is, after all, a girl, and Wanda knows the way the world wants girls, all rounded edges and yielding flesh. But there is a stiffness to her, a harshness to the set of her shoulders and the haze-prickle of pain ringed around her mind like an electric fence. There is a power to her, too, a strength rumbling deep in her core – but, first, the prickle._

_Wanda smiles, soft and wry._

_“Sorry,” she says, “I’m a little bit telepathic. It unnerves people, or so I’ve heard. But I thought you, perhaps, might understand.”_

_The girl looks up. Wanda sticks out her hand to shake. “Wanda Maximoff.”_

_“Daisy Johnson,” the girl says, and doesn’t take it._

_Wanda pulls her hand back, slowly, watches Daisy Johnson curl even further into herself. It’s an urge she understands, a feeling like vulnerability, but sideways._

_She says:  “Why do we lose things, Daisy Johnson?”_

_Daisy uncurls, then, stretching out her legs till her toes touch the floor. She tilts her chin up, meets Wanda’s eyes, bright-eyed and defiant. In her head somewhere Wanda can hear something is screaming._

_“I don't know,” she says, “you’re the one who can read minds. You tell me.”_

_Wanda blinks. She considers. She thinks about –_

_“You know what we are running from, yes?” she says. Daisy nods, eyes flicking dismissively to the side._

_“Registration. People who want to arrest you.” Daisy’s voice is dry, unimpressed; it makes Wanda want to laugh. It makes her furious. “In case you hadn’t noticed, they kind of want to arrest me, too.”_

_“No,” says Wanda, sharply. Daisy blinks._

_“I do not fear your government,” says Wanda. “I do not fear these men with guns. I grew up around men like that, and even then they have never been able to touch me.”_

_“I see,” says Daisy, but she does not see. Wanda will make her understand. It is, after all, her superpower._

_She says, “Tony Stark built my home, even after I tried to kill him. James Rhodes taught me to swear in fifteen different languages. Vision – we are made of the same power. We are the same.”_

_She shifts her gaze; her eyes are sharp, searing. She can feel it well up in her, that burning magic, the pain in her chest that has always been there and has only ever grown and that fuels her fire because now, now, she is able to speak it._

_“I know their names,” says Wanda. “They are my family. And now they are the enemy.”_

_She pauses. Daisy looks away._

_“Why is this, Daisy Johnson?” asks Wanda, and Daisy shrugs, and she is lying._

_“You say this like you expect me to understand it.”_

_“Ah,” Wanda says, “but you do.”_

_Daisy stares at the floor, at her lap, at her hands, twisted and folded in it. Wanda watches her, and feels it again, that prickle. That sharp place like a broken bone, like harsh sobs muffled in the middle of the night. These are dark places Wanda has known, and now they are places that she can touch._

_It throbs at the contact, that sharp open wound. She pushes in further._

_“I had a brother,” she says. “Pietro.”_

_Daisy says, “Stop.”_

_“We were twins,” says Wanda. “But that’s such a simple word for it, isn’t it? Such an easy syllable. Small. What we were was not small. He was the other half of my heart.”_

_Her voice cracks on the last word. That’s alright. Pain is not shameful. She will be ashamed, truly and deeply, the day she no longer bleeds for her brother._

_Daisy twists, like she wants to lean forward, to confront; like she wants to recoil. Her face shifts like an earthquake. Her eyes blaze with fury, hot as magma. Her hands are in fists._

_“Right,” she says, she bites out: “right, let me guess. Did he die, by any chance? While you were out there, saving the world, and so now you can tell me that you know what it feels like to lose your family, all the sacrifices people like us have to make, and we can be, we can be lonely little superhero orphans together?”_

_Wanda meets her glare, gaze cool and calm as a forest pool. It chills the fire in Daisy’s eyes, leaves her face hard and cracking as igneous rock._

_“He did die,” says Wanda. When it happened she had mouthed the words over and over again, in a dozen different languages, trying to force her tongue around the words. It would not go. It took a week. Now they come out smooth, polished from practice._

_“He died in Sokovia. This monster who killed him, I created that. That was my fault, whoever else’s it may have been, it was mine.” She clears her throat, doesn’t blink. “I may as well have killed him myself.”_

_Daisy’s mouth crumbles. She looks softly, painfully ashamed._

_“I’m sorry.”_

_“I know you are,” says Wanda. “Just as I know that you are kind.”_

_Daisy laughs, like cracked glass. “I am not kind.”_

_“Yes, you are,” Wanda says, because she sees, and she has learned to tell the truth. “But you’re not sorry because of kindness.”_

_“No.”_

_“You see,” says Wanda, smiling. “You do understand.”_

_Daisy pauses, hesitates. Hovers on the cusp of something, the edge of a cliff, her toes peeking over. Wanda knows the feeling, would recognise it even without her power. She has felt it herself, huddled in the house her parents built with bombs falling through the ceiling, caged like an animal by bad men as they made her something no man would ever again control, feeling her heart torn from her chest in the ruins of her city. She has felt it herself, the spark in her hands, the spark in her heart, meeting kindling – epiphany, eruption, a moment of tipping and breaking and healing._

_Daisy curls, again, shoulders hunching, like a fern in the face of a storm. Wanda knows she recognises it, too._

_“We are made of the same pain,” says Wanda, and pushes. “We are the same.”_

_When Wanda was a girl she was afraid of the world and so she threw herself into it, shoulders back and chin up, because to show the world fear is to show the long line of your throat to a mad dog, to show a sniper the whites of your eyes. When the power came it roared through her like a wildfire and lit her up like a torch, and all the horrors of the world shrank back._

_“Why do we lose things?” Wanda asks._

_Daisy drops her eyes. Her voice shakes. It’s not the only thing that does. “Because we break things.”_

_And when the power came Wanda curled into herself like she could smother the flame inside her because what does one do when one becomes the monster? Do you show fear to yourself?_

_Daisy Johnson watches her with her hands pressed to her stomach, clutching a storm to her chest with her shivering fingers. Wanda remembers how it felt, how this felt, before she knew the answer._

_“Perhaps,” says Wanda, and -_

***

There are days, Clint reflects, when everything is going alright. When the sun is shining, and the birds are singing, and he is calmly, cheerfully saving the world with a stick and a bit of string or finally, _finally_ spending some quality time with his kids or otherwise not falling face-first into a dumpster. There are days when life is good. There are days when all is well.

“Okay,” says Phil Coulson, “this looks bad.”

There are days, thinks Clint, when the world is fair and kind. Days when he has not just been broken out of underwater Guantanamo Bay by Steve freaking Rogers and airlifted, without so much as a hello, to a secret base in the ass-end of nowhere. Days when he could conceivably have dealt with this shit like an adult. Days when he could have dealt with this shit, like, in general.

This is not one of those days.

“So,” says Clint, “Not dead then.”

“It would seem so,” Phil says, and smiles. His tie is perfectly knotted.

Clint smiles back. Phil doesn’t flinch, but he doesn’t have to. The two of them understand each other.

“That’s not,” says Clint, “going to be a lasting state of affairs.”

Phil just looks at him, eyes wide and shuttered-open, head slightly cocked. A muscle twitches in his cheek; his shoulders are quietly tense. Clint remembers: his first mission, straight out of SHIELD academy, when he was twenty and really, really stupid, like even stupider than he is now. He’d thrown himself off of a roof to make a shot, fallen eight floors onto the roof of a drug kingpin’s brand new Mercedes Benz, and landed flat on his ass.

He’d landed the shot, of course. He’d also managed to land a broken leg, a fractured pelvis, three cracked ribs and a really, really terrible concussion. There had been some brain swelling. A medically induced coma may have been involved. Clint doesn’t really care to remember in too much detail.

What he does remember is: Phil Coulson, his handler, the first face leaning over his hospital bed when he opened his eyes. Phil Coulson, with his quietly tense shoulders, saying _Agent Barton, what part of the term “covert surveillance” do you not understand?_. Phil Coulson, with his bland smile and soft eyes and tiny twitch in his cheek.

“I see,” he says now, perfectly even. “Bullet or arrow?”

“Nat owes me, so probably neither,” says Clint, and then, for clarification: “I kind of just want to punch you repeatedly in the face.”

Phil blinks. Sighs, long and hard, his hands tucked deep into his pockets.

“Well,” he says, “I guess I sort of deserve it.”

“Yeah,” says Clint. “You do.”

The silence that falls is not at all comfortable, but Clint’s a sniper. He breathes through it.

“I would have told you, you know,” says Phil, after the world’s longest moment.

“You _could_ have told me,” says Clint. “But you didn’t.”

Phil smiles again. This time he does flinch. “I didn’t think it was so important.”

Clint narrows his eyes. He remembers –

He remembers being twenty-one, twenty-five, twenty-seven, sitting bored and yawning in a grey and featureless conference room as his handler tried to teach him tradecraft. It’d been a lost cause – Clint could do stealth from a rooftop on the other end of the street, could shoot from further than most people could even see with a weapon that was effectively silent, could lie still for hours so you couldn’t even hear his breathing, but put him in a room with a target and he’d say something stupid and cover-rupturing or, worse, _shoot_ something cover-rupturing, his forgettable farmboy face suddenly becoming a neon sign broadcasting his intentions for the entire city to see.

And yet.

When Clint was twenty-nine, almost thirty, he dropped a redheaded Russian off on Coulson’s doorstep on a Sunday with a grin and a _here’s your spy, sir_. But until then, until then – Coulson had taught him tradecraft, had smiled his bland handler smile, which Clint had long come to read as a dead-inside feeling and a desperate need for a drink. Had done his best.

Clint remembers: Coulson, talking about clearance, about _need to know_ and _compartmentalisation_ and _trusting the system_. Coulson, saying _essential information only, Agent. Try and stick to the brief, for once in your life_. He remembers: Coulson, teaching him not to flinch.

The kind of anger Clint feels now is bad news for a sniper, worse news for a spy. At the very least he is not a spy. 

“You bastard,” he says, soft and cold, his heart pounding. “I thought I’d killed you.”

“ _I_ never thought that,” says Phil, Phil Coulson who had never once told him the truth, apparently, not even with a magical dagger through his – “Not even when I was dead.”

“Yeah, well,” Clint says, “who gives a shit what you think?”

Phil sighs. Clint is well acquainted with the timbre of his sighs, by now; he’s fairly certain he’d been the catalyst behind the creation of at least a dozen of them. But he can’t quite read this one. Maybe he doesn’t really want to.

 “I would have told you,” says Phil, after a moment. “But Fury told me not to. And then I was… busy. And then _you_ were busy. And after that – ”

Clint’s heart is still pounding. He takes a deep breath, crosses his arms. “What.”

“After that,” says Phil, and all of a sudden he looks like he had when Clint was thirty-two, coming back from an op to find his handler alone in a briefing room with a bottle of whiskey he hadn’t even bothered to conceal, a folder lying open on the desk in front of him, three young kids staring sightless up from the pages. All of a sudden he looks like he had when Clint was forty, through a haze of blue light and the tendrils of control, as a traitor’s arrow flew past his ear and blew his world to pieces.  

“After that,” says Phil, and all of a sudden he just looks _tired_ , “it became increasingly clear to me that what I’d lost I’m never getting back. The world is different now. I’m different. I guess it just felt easier to act like I’d never come back at all.”

“Oh,” says Clint, and.

Clint remembers: waking up on the helicarrier, lump swelling on the back of his scalp, feeling sick and hung over and ready to vomit or faint or cry, maybe two of the three. He remembers Natasha, hands gentle on his shoulders, welcoming him back, without anger, without judgment. He remembers the throb in his skull and how he’d remembered, then, his first mission, the strained-amused face of Phil Coulson telling him through his pounding headache what a dumbass he had been. He remembers Nat holding his hands and meeting his eyes and telling him, voice soft, that his handler was dead.

Clint remembers: after, New York at peace and him alone in a bed in a motel in Jersey, wanting to melt into the sheets, wanting to burrow in and never come out, wanting to wash the stain of his guilt away, somehow; wanting to die. He remembers Natasha walking into his room, heels clacking on the stiff linoleum. He remembers telling her that he wouldn’t go with her, he wouldn’t go – _the world has changed, Nat, I’m not the same, everything is over, just let me –_

She could have said, _Laura_. She could have said, _your children_. She said: _buck up, Barton, is this what he would have wanted?_

Clint remembers: getting up, brushing his teeth, shaving. Climbing into the jet Nat had requisitioned, flying home to cry into his wife’s arms, turning up at SHIELD headquarters the next Monday for orders, for a mission. He remembers coming back, into a world that was different now, in a body that didn’t fit right. How hard it had been, how much it had hurt. How much he had feared it. How it had felt: impossible.

He remembers coming back, anyway. _Buck up, Barton_ – because –

“I’m glad you’re not dead, you son of a bitch,” he says, and Phil smiles, a different smile. They always understood each other. Probably they still do.

“Don’t you talk about my mother that way,” says Phil, and Clint knows he means _I’ve missed you too_.

***

She finds him, eventually, on a bench in a quiet corner of the empty gym: right hand hung loose between his knees, shoulders hunched. Head ducked low; face hidden behind a curtain of hair. She hadn’t been looking, obviously – why would she have been looking? – but she finds him, anyway.

She shuffles her feet as she crosses the threshold, loud enough so she knows he’s heard, will know that she is coming.

“Hey,” says Simmons, and smiles. “Mind if I join you?”

He glances up at her, quick and sidelong, eyes a sharp clear ice-blue but shuttered, somehow. She remembers, a flash of an introduction – _Bucky Barnes_ , soft and quiet, hands stuffed into his pockets, eyes focused on a spot on the wall by her left shoulder.

After a moment he slides over, just an inch, and she sits down beside him.

“So Fitz and I were talking,” says Simmons, “and we’re pretty sure – well, I say _pretty sure_ , really we’re almost a hundred percent certain – anyway, we think that we can probably do something about your arm.”

Bucky shifts a little beside her; Simmons looks over to find him staring. Studying her. It’s a little disconcerting, but she finds she doesn’t mind too much – she’s studied so many things in her life; it seems only fair to be on the receiving end, for once.

She loosens her shoulders, deliberately, but when she meets his gaze, he blinks and looks back down.

“Really,” he says. His voice is like it was when he’d introduced himself: low, soft, a little rough but surprisingly warm. “What kind of something?”

“Oh, you know,” Simmons says. She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “Fix it. Replace it. Fitz’s been working on a new lightweight alloy for body armour for our team, it’s still in its development stages but he’s pretty optimistic.”

She glances over again, and, yes – Bucky’s back to watching her, lips pressed together and tilted slightly down, eyebrows knitted in what looks to her like confusion. It makes her think, a little bit, of Fitz after Ward, searching for a word he’d lost somewhere. It makes her heart hurt. She clears her throat, quietly.

“And I’d like to take a look at that neural interface,” she says. “Smooth things out a bit, help you get rid of, of any feedback.”

“You don’t have to do that,” says Bucky. It comes out slightly raw.

Simmons shrugs.

“Oh, really, it’s no trouble. It’s not often that I get to look at something so _fascinating_ ,” she says, and then, images of HYDRA operating tables flashing suddenly and painfully across her vision:  “Oh – sorry. Sorry, I didn’t mean – “

A small snort of laughter. Bucky’s smiling at her, now, a slight amused twitch of the lips, and Simmons smiles back, somewhat sheepish. She likes his smile, she decides: it’s warm, like his voice had been. Genuine and – kind. Shockingly kind. It’s something that demands her respect.

“It’s fine,” says Bucky, with a shrug of his own. “You don’t have to do that. I don’t – “

He flexes his fingers, thoughtfully. Index finger, middle, thumb, like playing an arpeggio, or shaking out a cramp from a too-tight grip.

“I’m glad it’s gone,” he says, finally. He’s still smiling, kind of.

“But it’s…” says Simmons, somewhat helplessly. “It’s _your arm_.”

“It was a weapon,” says Bucky. His fingers clench, form a fist. “I don’t – I don’t need access to any more weapons.”

They sit in silence for a moment. Simmons gropes for something to say, comes up with nothing but dead air. She knows, in the end, she decides. Knows the feeling; not what to say, but – she knows. So she just waits.

“I could still hurt you, you know,” Bucky says, and his smile is still there but now it looks more like a wince.

Simmons turns her head, faces him full on.

“I know,” she says. Then, after a pause: “Have you met May?”

Bucky blinks. “Yes.”

“And Daisy? You know, mini-ninja, super-hacker, can make earthquakes with her fingers Daisy?”

“We’ve been introduced,” says Bucky, sounding mildly amused. Simmons smiles.

“Look,” she says, straightening her shoulders, laying her hands palm-up over her knees. “I’m a biochemist. I never passed the field exam.”

She pauses, chuckles a little. “I never even _took_ the field exam.”

Bucky’s watching her again, frowning again, and this time she thinks she knows what it is he’s looking for. She thinks of Daisy, when she’d still been Skye, tremors shivering from her fingers, eyes blown wide. How she’d looked when Simmons had brought her a cup of tea, between blood tests, her own hands unshaking around the cup. She thinks of Fitz, for a month after she’d gone and come back again, every time she’d smiled at him and he’d flinched so fast anyone but her might not have seen.

She thinks of how Fitz had looked, after Ward, searching for a word he couldn’t find. How it had hurt so much she had chosen to run away. How she had wanted so badly to find it, so she could give it to him.

“If I feared everyone who could hurt me,” says Simmons, and looks Bucky dead in the eye, “I wouldn’t have any friends.”

Something in Bucky’s face twists, and he sucks in a breath so sharp it sounds painful.

“To be honest,” he says, after a little pause,  “I’m a little bit terrified of _you_.”

“Well,” says Simmons, tilting her head, “given your previous experiences, I’d say that’s probably completely justified.”

Bucky laughs at that, a rusty-warm chuckle spooling out of his throat, and Simmons grins.

“You won’t hurt me,” he says. “You won’t.”

“I won’t,” says Simmons, and takes his hand. “And neither will you.”

The look on his face warms her from the inside. She gives his hand a little squeeze, and he lets her.

***

“Honest question, here,” says the man at the entrance of Mack’s garage. “Are you fixing that, or rigging it to explode?”

Mack grins up from around bits of engine.

“Just de-stressing,” he says, and nods in greeting. He’d wave hello, but his left hand is tangled up in wires and his right, besides being similarly tangled, had been picking a carburettor to bits earlier and is currently covered up to the wrist in grease. 

The man – Sam Wilson, because as if Mack wouldn’t remember the name of the _only other black guy on base –_ smiles back, a warm and easy smile that lights his face up appealingly.

He takes another few steps into the garage. “I see,” he says, eyes dancing.

Mack shrugs. “Been a long week,” he says, and something darkens in Sam’s eyes.

“Yeah,” says Sam, and sighs. “I know something about that.”

He stands and watches as Mack rips out a handful of the wires twined around his fingers, uses a pair of pliers to trim the dangling ends. Watches as Mack twists the raw copper ends together, forging new connections from the old; Mack can feel him, hovering unobtrusively over his shoulder. He takes a step back, lets Sam lean in.

“Used to be a mechanic,” says Mack, as Sam examines his work with a sharp eye and an admiring twist to his mouth. “I guess I’m still a mechanic.”

Sam nods, steps out of Mack’s way. “I used to be in the air force,” he says.

Mack snorts.

“Really,” he says. “Never would’ve guessed.”

He twists a final pair of wires together, considers the jumble with crossed arms. It looks pretty good, to him. It probably won’t even explode. Sometimes he thinks that ever since SHIELD blew up his standards for okay situations have been depressingly low.

The exposed copper, though – that’s just begging for short circuits, electric shocks, sparks. The thought makes him wince harder than he would’ve, last week.

Sam hands him a roll of electrical tape. It takes him a moment to realise, to take it.

“Just before this though,” says Sam, with a little smile, “I was a counsellor with the VA.”

“Oh?” says Mack, winding the tape around the first set of wires. It comes out too much like, _oh_.

“Yeah,” Sam says. He pauses. “I liked that. It was a good life.”

Mack nods. He knows. It’s why he’s here, after all, up to his elbows in pieces of car.

“Ever miss it?” he asks, though he already knows the answer.

Sam chuckles a little.

“Hell yeah,” says Sam. “Every day.”

He walks around to the other side of the hood, leans against it. Gets close enough for a better view but, still: far enough not to be a bother. It’s a calculated move, Mack knows, the consideration of a man with a vet’s experience and a pilot’s sense of space. He appreciates it.

“This line of work’s not too bad, though,” says Sam, soft and thoughtful. Mack glances up at him, blinks.

“Great dental plan,” he says, after a moment, and Sam laughs.

“Oh, yeah, the greatest,” says Sam, and flashes a mouthful of shining white teeth. “And the food. You ever seen Steve Rogers cook? Dude grew up in the Depression, he can make a full casserole with a single green bean.”

“I know what you mean,” Mack says, and looks away so Sam can’t see the twinkle in his eyes. “Fitz makes a _mean_ stroganoff.”

Fitz does, actually, make an excellent stroganoff. He’d brought it in a large, battered crock pot for the single Team Potluck they’d managed to squeeze in between preventing a terrigen apocalypse and losing Simmons to a HYDRA death cult-planet-thing. Mack had, and still has, no idea where that boy learned to make stroganoff like that, given that his coffee tastes more or less like exhaust and, once, when Simmons had been away, Mack had caught him burning lettuce in the toaster.

There’s a bolt in the engine that doesn’t, strictly speaking, need to be there; Mack reaches for a wrench and Sam hands it to him with a grin.

“And the press,” says Sam, over the pause, not even bothering with a straight face. “I am _loving_ this whole public adoration thing.”

There’s a little twist in his smile, though. Mack winces. Hidden underground base or no – they still get the paper.

“Yeah,” says Mack, a little flatly, “the whole _shady non-existent government agency_ thing? Gets me up in the morning.”

The bolt’s stuck. Mack gives it a thwack.

Sam clears his throat.

“And,” he says, dramatically, “this uniform makes my ass look _incredible_.”

Mack looks up. Sam cocks a hip, spreads his arms. Does a little twirl. Said uniform, on closer inspection, is mostly maroon spandex pulled tighter than any material has any reason to be pulled. The zipper’s a new lockable design he knows Fitz has been working on for weeks. All of a sudden the total silence he’s been hearing from the lab makes sense.

Mack’s had his fair share of experience with the wonder twins cramming people into spandex, so. If he could hate the uniform, he _would_.

He raises an eyebrow, instead.

“That a major concern for you?” he says.

“Oh, _yeah_ ,” says Sam, mercifully turning back around. “I mean, do you see what I’m going up against? Those star-spangled muscles, man. If I’m being honest, I gotta tell you, I signed up for this shit just to get a better view.”

Mack laughs. The bolt loosens; he tosses it on the floor, sticks the last hanging wire in through the hole. A yank and a twist and the engine looks completely mangled, with a pointless wire poking through it. But that’s just how it _looks_.

“Really?” he says. “For me, it was the flying car.”

“Wait,” says Sam, “that thing _flies_?”

Mack steps back, slams the hood shut.

“It does now.”

He knows he probably looks obnoxiously smug, but, hey, warranted.

Sam blinks. He blinks again.

“I’ll trade you,” he says, after a moment.

Mack shrugs. “I’ll think about it.”

He opens the driver’s door, pulls a key from his pocket, gets grease stains all over the jacket. There was a time when he was always covered in grease, like this, all the time. Every day. He could never get any of it to wash away.

The stains come out easily, now. Maybe he’s just gotten better at washing; every stain’s a piece of cake once you get the hang of scrubbing out blood. Well, besides curry, maybe.

He slides the key in the ignition, turns; the engine rattles and then hums, a low roar. Some things, Mack knows, never change. And some things do. He’d told Fitz, once, lifetimes ago – it’s not fun, but it’s okay.

“It’s not that bad, really,” says Sam, “when you think about it. Is it?”

“No,” says Mack. “No, I guess it isn’t.”

He turns the key again, and the engine stills. Sam is watching him, arms crossed, something pinched between his eyes.

“Ever regret it?” Sam says, and Mack knows he already knows, too.

“Yeah,” says Mack. He climbs out of the car, shuts the door. “All the damn time.”

They stand in silence, for a while. In the silence a lot of things feel like they’re missing. But not saving the world doesn’t mean you don’t lose friends; it’s just, here, sometimes you lose more.

Sam shifts, bumps up against Mack’s hip. Mack startles; Sam grins. The thread of the thought is gone.

“But hey,” says Sam. “ _Flying car_.”

Mack smiles.

“Play your cards right, Sparrow,” he says, “I might just teach you how to drive it.”

***

“Captain.”

“Director.”

Coulson winces, very slightly. It’s his standard response to the title, which, yes, he knows: problematic. He’s been working on getting rid of it. It’s an ongoing process.

Rogers – Steve – looks apologetic. Steely, but apologetic. It’s a good look for him; he must wear it often.

“If I’d known you’d be here, I’d have brought a new set of trading cards,” he says, with a little smile.

“I’ll consider that just punishment, then,” Coulson says, and smiles back.

They stand in silence for a while. Coulson no longer has much of an urge to fidget – spies don’t, as a general rule, unless they’re going undercover as someone who does – but in moments like these he remembers the feeling keenly.

“Look,” says Steve, eventually. “I’m sorry to burden you with this. Every government in the world will be looking for us. It’s not fair to put you and your team in danger.”

He says it earnestly, honestly, with the air of a commander pushed to tactics he’s not entirely proud of: a firm, grateful sort of guilt. Coulson understands the tone. He understands the feeling – intimately, in fact. He _understands_ , and so he _probably_ should not find this at all funny, but.

“It’s alright, Captain,” he says, and grins a little. “The government already hates us anyway.”

Steve chuckles, small and startled, and Coulson lets his grin widen. Two years as Director, and he still hasn’t made up his mind about how much visible emotion counts as appropriate – Fury, after all, had seldom smiled, but then again Fury had also given him an enormous jet with SHIELD logos on the wings as thanks for not dying and a flying car as an apology for destroying his card collection. On the whole, mixed messages; not exactly an easy precedent to follow.

Here, though, grinning seems appropriate, _feels_ appropriate. Sharing a smile with a colleague, an equal, someone who had been a part of his team, briefly, once upon a time – it feels good. Like something he’s missed, though he hasn’t, really. Like, more accurately – like something he’s wanted.       

But: Steve laughs in parade rest, hands clasped behind his back, posture perfect. It kind of hurts to look at.  

“I’ve made mistakes, Coulson,” he says, mouth turning down in a frown, eyes dark with guilt.

Coulson looks at him. He says, “I know.”

Here is something about Coulson that he knows to be true: he’s a perfectionist, in work if not in life. He keeps his shirts clean and starched, his pens in a neat line, his paperwork perfectly indexed. Chaos may reign in the world, and as far as he knows it probably _does_ , but within SHEILD, within the parts of this disaster of an organisation that he can hold cupped in too-small hands – well. He’ll be damned if he sleeps before he gets it _right_.

SHIELD intel on Captain America is extensive. Strengths, weaknesses, preferred fighting techniques; vital statistics, voice imprint, full psych exam. Coulson has copies of every medical exam Steven Grant Rogers has ever undergone in his life, conscious and unconscious both; he has classified SSR files and costume designs and mission reports in Rogers’ handwriting. And in all this time he has never put this thing together, this thing that is so _stupidly simple_.

This thing: that Steve Rogers is a _boy_ , four years older than Simmons and seven IQ points lower than Fitz. He’s been through hell, has fought in a war, has been a good soldier and a solid leader – but so has Daisy Johnson, with powers just as new, and even before this latest string of horrific screw-ups Coulson only ever had to glance into her eyes to know that that’s not enough.

SHIELD intel on Captain America is extensive, but Steve Rogers is not Captain America. He’s just a man, standing here in a too-tight grey T-shirt and khakis that have seen better days, strong and brave and sad and trying his damndest to keep hold on a disaster. He’s just a man, clutching at the world in shaking desperate hands and begging it not to blow up in his face.

Coulson could _kick_ himself.    

“I know,” Coulson says. “So have I. You don’t want to know about them, it’s really not pretty.”

He smiles a little at this; Steve blinks.

“I’m not sure if I,” he says, looking down. “I – I chose this path because I think it’s right. I’m doing what I think is right.”

Coulson remembers: when he was young, when he still believed in doing what was right – rather than, say, what was going to stop the world from ending this week. Back before it was sliced out of him with a magical spear or shot out when Grant Ward put three bullets in Victoria Hand or lifted away, replaced by a data cube and a promotion, that belief had been heavy, solid, all-consuming. It had been a rock, an anchor. It had been a weight.

Steve’s hands are still folded behind his back, his eyes flicking upwards, to the right. Coulson looks. His knuckles have gone white.

“But my friends have been hurt by my decisions,” he says. “They have families. I don’t – I can’t lead them in this. I don’t know if I should.”

It had been a weight, that belief. Like his badge had been a weight, rested over his heart. Like his gun had been a weight in his hand, black and bulky, when he was twenty-two years old and fresh out of college and learning to shoot.

Like a shield used to be a weight, hung over Steve Rogers’ arm.

Weights are burdens, Coulson knows. But even burdens become a part of you. To rip them away is a cruelty, leaves you unbalanced, untethered. Disarmed, unbelonging. Bereft.

“Maybe you shouldn’t,” says Coulson, with a little shrug. “Maybe you can’t.”

Steve looks up, startled. Eyes wide, and Coulson meets them.

“But they think you can,” he says. “They need you. Maybe you’re not enough, but. I don’t think you know how to back down from a fight.”

Steve sighs. He sags a little with it. “It might be better if I did.”

“It’d make for much less interesting comic books, though.”

Steve’s smile is small, sharp, twisted up at one corner. It’s a little wry, a little cracked, more than a little tragic. It’s probably the most honest smile Coulson has seen all day.

“I used to idolise you when I was younger,” he says, as if it weren’t already obvious.  “I thought, if I could just be like you – if I could have your courage, and your honour, and your principles, I’d maybe be someone worthwhile.”

“I’m not the man you think I am, Phil,” Steve says, and Coulson knows this. He knows.

“And I’m not the man I was,” he says. It’s true. Sometime he still feels it, like a phantom limb, the person he used to be, the heft of that belief. The way his hands had felt: both flesh, both steady, not trying to cling to things that were never his to keep.

Captain America was never SHIELD’s; that was always their mistake. And Steve Rogers is not one of his. But he is young, and he tips forward a little like his back still hasn’t adjusted to the sudden lack of counterweight, and his hands – well. In a way they are the same. Really, really, they are each other’s. And in the end, after everything, they can forgive each other for this.

“I think we can call it even,” says Coulson, and thinks that maybe, just maybe, tonight he might sleep in.

***

“What you did,” says Clint, “It wasn’t your fault.”

“I know,” says Daisy.

Clint smiles at her, crooked and wry.

“No, you don’t,” he says. “But you will.”

***

Five in the morning: Steve gives up on sleep, rolls out of his borrowed quarters and into the kitchen. There’s someone there already, surprisingly – a young man at the counter, back turned to the door, his hair a mess of curls. He’s filling a chipped mug with a dark liquid that looks almost too thick to pour, hands steady but a little over-eager. His cuffs are stained with grease.

For a moment he looks so familiar that Steve feels it hit, a fist to the ribcage. He makes himself smile a little.

“Doctor Fitz, isn’t it?” he says, and the man whirls around so fast his mug sloshes dangerously.

“Oh – yes!” he says, smiling a little sheepishly. He plunks the mug on the counter, winces a little at the noise. “Well, just Fitz. Leo Fitz. Pleased to meet you, Captain Rogers. Sir.”

He sticks out his hand to shake. Steve takes it. Fitz’s handshake is firm – a little fumbling and slightly nervous, but strong. Solid. If Steve were the sort of person to judge people by their handshakes, he’d probably be more than a little impressed.

His own handshake is, of course, perfect. He’d practiced, in the war. 

“Just Steve. Please,” he says, and Fitz smiles a little wider.

“Steve, then,” says Fitz, rolling his tongue over the vowels. The words come out a little different than Steve was expecting. Sharper, rounder, warmer. Foreign and familiar.

Familiar. Steve remembers voices like this: a fortress in the Highlands the Commandos had used as a base for three weeks in ’43, a codebreaker friend of Peggy’s he’d run into in London, hair like cut wheat and eyes like a winter sky and a voice like thunder rolling over green mountains. He knows voices like this, feels at home in them, almost, but then – war had felt a little like home to him too, hadn’t it.

Fitz sees him looking, sees him watching a little too long. Steve knows; these are the things he looks out for, too. He tenses on his next inhale, sets his shoulders back; Fitz just blinks. Keeps smiling.

“So, Steve,” he says, leaning a hip against the counter, “what can I do for you?”

Steve pauses. Breathes. Forces himself to relax, neck and shoulders and fingers and –

“Nothing. I’m just here for coffee.”

Fitz winces, a little overdramatically.

“Oh, poor choice. I mean,” nodding towards the pot of black sludge with a small scowl, “it’s fresh, but that’s because _I_ just made it.”

“From what I hear,” says Steve, raising an eyebrow, “you’re pretty good at making things.”

Fitz laughs, a small amused huff, leans back further against the counter.

“Not coffee,” he says. “No self-respecting engineer actually drinks coffee for _coffee_. If I could get Simmons to invent a safe intravenous caffeine drip I’d be on it by now. And then I’d sell it to every half-crazed idiot at MIT and make _millions_.”

He grins a little as he says this, takes another swig from his mug. His grin is a little sharp at the edges, but not cruel, just – playful, and bright, and it’s kind of hard to look at, because:

Steve remembers having a smile like that, a smile that twisted at the corners, sharp knowing joy glinting over a split lip, a bruised cheek. Bucky used to say he had the smile of a hellion, used to roll his eyes at Steve’s angry scrappy grin. He used to say, _you gotta work on that, Stevie, or they’re just gonna want to punch you again,_ laughing as he said it, and Steve would smirk at him, a little feral at the tips.

But then again, if he’s honest: Fitz’s smile is nothing like that at all. It’s warm and soft and non-combative, just like Steve’s is, now. And that’s the thing, really, isn’t it? The irony: he’s gotten so that it wouldn’t even matter if someone socked him in the mouth, and – still.       

“We used to boil grounds in a pot over a fire,” Steve says, with a little smooth smile. “I think I’ll be fine.”

He reaches for the coffee pot. Fitz gets out of the way, sighing heavily, goes to the sink to grab a clean mug with a SHIELD logo on the front. Steve takes it without comment.

 “I’ve been meaning to talk to you, actually,” says Fitz, as Steve pours.

He looks up. Fitz is watching him.

“Oh?”

“Yeah.” Fitz bites his lip; his fingers twitch. “I just wanted to say, you know, I’m sorry for all the. For all of the stuff you’re dealing with, you know, right now.”

Steve takes a sip of coffee. He shuts his eyes, just for a second.

“Thank you,” he says. “I appreciate that.”

He takes another sip of coffee. He thinks about – no, not really.

He looks up; Fitz is still watching him. Their eyes meet, and Fitz purses his lips, matching his gaze with a searing look that grabs on tight and _holds_.

“And,” he says, and doesn’t blink, “that I understand.”

Steve lowers his mug. “I’m sure you do,” he says, and his smile is tight, now, like he had in the movies.

He moves to go. Fitz calls after him.

“Have you met Jemma?” he says, and something in his voice makes Steve freeze.

“Doctor Simmons?” says Steve. “Yes.”

He turns back around. Fitz is smiling again, softer this time, looking down at the floor or his own hands, Steve can’t quite tell. There’s that something that was in his voice – in his eyes, now. A shy sort of twinkle. Steve thinks of Peggy, her red lips, her dark eyes.

He swallows. “She’s – really something,” he adds, and Fitz beams.

“She is,” says Fitz. “I love her.”

“Well,” says Steve. “Good for you.”

The coffee in his hand has gone cool, the temperature of warmed marble, bloodless skin. He gulps it down anyway. It’s bitter.

Fitz blinks at him, smile still lost and loving, eyes knowing and sardonic. He grabs for the kettle, fills it; reaches for a box of tea bags on a high shelf.

“She’s my best friend,” says Fitz, fingertips straining. “Has been for years. We – we finish each other’s sentences, and she knows what goes in my favourite sandwich, and in the lab, we.”

Steve reaches up, places the box on the counter. Fitz rolls his eyes.

“Thanks,” he says, drily, and pops the lid. “Well, anyway. In the lab – maybe seventy percent of the things I’ve made since I met Simmons, I could never have done alone. And I’m sure she’d say the same about me. Sometimes people forget we’re not actually one person. It bothers me less than it probably should.”

“I know something about that,” Steve says.

The kettle whistles. Fitz blinks. “Yeah.”

He fills a cup with hot water, steam rising in a tall white column. There’s a cleanness to steam, the smell of it. Bathwater and rain.

When Steve had been – younger, smaller – he’d loved the smell of coffee, the hot dark rich bitter smog of it. But water has its own appeal. He’d learned to breathe it in, later.

Fitz fishes a ragged bag out of the box, pops it in the mug.

“I would do anything for her,” says Fitz. “Absolutely anything. I’d die for her. I’d even – I’d even kill for her. I wouldn’t like it, but I would.”

He shuffles his feet a bit, dips his chin, but his gaze locks on Steve’s and doesn’t waver.

“Two years ago, I made a mistake. Because of that, she – fell through a hole, in space and time. Ended up on a dead planet, all alone, fighting something that thought, not entirely unreasonably, that it was the devil.”

His lips tip upwards, and there it is again, that bitter twist that shouldn’t be enviable at all. “And I – it took me a year to get her back. A whole year. I left her there. I just – left her there.”

“I’m sorry,” says Steve. Fitz nods.

“You know,” he says, “a while ago I was tossed in the bottom of the ocean. I thought I was going to die. Ended up with – with some brain damage that I’m frankly surprised I don’t still have. And that was awful.”

The water in the mug has gone brown, a dark rich amber. Fitz drops his eyes, watches it change. Prods the teabag with a spoon.

“But losing Jemma,” he says, and pauses, and breathes. “Losing Jemma – that was the worst day of my life. Every day for that year was the worst day of my life, and even after I got her back, all I could think was how she had changed.”

He looks up, again. Steve is watching him now, tracking his movements. Pressing his lips together, slightly.

“You missed her the way she was.”

“I did.”

Steve nods, small, sharp. Fitz blinks.

“But that’s not,” he says, slow and clear, “It’s not – I wasn’t, she was still, after everything, she was still incredible. And she was still my, my partner, you know. Still the girl I loved. But she was different.”

“Yes,” says Steve, and Fitz shakes his head.

“No,” he says, “Listen. She was different, and that hurt, but. That didn’t bother me so much as – as the thought that I’d let her get that way. That I’d broken her.”

The water in the mug is the colour of mahogany. Fitz fishes out the bag, squeezing it dry on the spoon. Steve watches. His mouth feels dry.

“I loved her so much,” says Fitz, flicking the bag into the trash. “And I failed her. And it was the worst thing in the world, but I couldn’t even have that pain, because I didn’t deserve it. After all, she was the one who’d gotten broken.”

Steve takes a breath. He looks down at his hands. He says: “Yeah.”

When Steve was younger, smaller, coffee had made his heart pound, rabbit-quick. Made his face flush till his cheeks were hot as a coal stove, made his breath quicken till it came in gasps, leaned up against the kitchen table.

It had been – fine. They hadn’t been able to afford much coffee, anyway.

Now, though, now – the mug in his hand. The coffee tastes a little like alcohol, sharp and acrid and full of things that he ought to feel but doesn’t. His heartbeat is steady. He breathes. He –

Things change. He knows that. He knows that things change. 

“He’s already forgiven you,” says Fitz.

Steve shuts his eyes. “I know.”

He sets the mug down on the counter. Fitz – stirs the tea, maybe. Crosses his arms. Hops up on the counter and kicks his heels. Walks away. Steve doesn’t know. He doesn’t look.

“Jemma never held it against me,” Fitz says, after a moment. His voice is soft; he hasn’t moved. Steve opens his eyes.

“I guess I understand. She failed me once, too, and that was – bad, but. I never would have wanted her to hate herself for it. It would have hurt too much, I think. To see someone I loved get ripped apart like that.”

He pops the spoon back in the mug. Holds it out. Steve stares at it, at him. Blinks.

Fitz cocks his head. “You want milk or sugar in this?”

“No,” says Steve. “No, I’ve, uh, I mean, I already have the coffee.”

Fitz narrows his eyes. Goes to the cupboards, rummages. Adds a splash of milk, two sugars, a third, stirs.

“Please, Steve,” he says, and holds out the mug again, “there’s nothing to be gained by torturing yourself.”

When Steve was young, he’d loved coffee, just the thought of it, the magic of it. The smell, the baked-earth smell of it, the smell of everything he couldn’t afford and couldn’t survive. When he was in the war, he’d had a coffee ration, coarse grounds boiled in a pot over a fire.

It had been awful: black, and bitter, like ash and tar. And Steve had drunk it, every morning, every chance he could. Because he wanted to. Because he wanted –

Because once, after Azzano, half-asleep: _what did they do to you, what did I let them do to you_ ; because, once, under sniper fire: _damn it, Steve, why did you come after me, I told you not to come!_ Because _this wasn’t about you, Buck, it was my choice, I wanted this,_ and _yeah, Stevie, I know, but I don’t have to like it_. Because of the look Steve caught, that morning in the field with the coffee brewing, the feeling that he had something to prove, to make it go away. 

Things change. He knows things change. People and places and hopes and desires. Limits. The world. He doesn’t have to like it.

But –  

The tea is a creamy brown, sepia-toned, steam still rising from the surface.

He reaches out a hand. The mug is warm.

“I suppose you’re right,” he says, and drinks.

***

“You,” says Fitz, pointing. “Wings.”

Sam raises an eyebrow. “No, me Sam,” he says, placing a palm on his chest. “You Jane?”

“Leo Fitz,” says Leo Fitz, and extends a hand with a rueful smile. Sam takes it and shakes. “It’s really an honour to meet you. Now, I think I’ve identified a problem with your propulsion system, and I’m also almost certain that I’ve found you a solution. I’ll need a look at those schematics as soon as possible, of course.”

He flicks his hand impatiently, half shooing motion, half eager grab. Sam is about to protest, probably loudly and _definitely_ indignantly, when a beam of light shoots out from Fitz’s palm and settles within his cupped fingers. It flickers for a second, then resolves itself into the image of a collection of gears, and then a pair of jets, and then a set of shoulder blades that look eerily familiar.

“Right,” says Sam, “Well. You seem pretty well set up here, but I’ll see what I can do.”

He looks over at Fitz. Fitz nods, absently, and starts picking apart a holographic representation of Sam’s back muscles.

This entire scenario, Sam decides, is starting to give him uncomfortable flashbacks.

“Great,” he mutters, “another engineer,” and flees before Fitz decides to sprout a goatee.

***

“Agent Romanoff.”

Romanoff looks up, smirk already pasted firmly on. “Agent May.”

They regard each other for a moment, eyes locking. May blinks first, slow, deliberate. Romanoff’s smirk melts into a smile, small but spreading slowly across her face. 

“How’s Hill?” asks May.

Romanoff lifts a shoulder, lowers it.

“How’s Morse?” she says, and May tilts her head, like _touché._

Romanoff’s smile grows. She folds her arms across her chest, loose and comfortable. She’d had the same cocky confidence in her movements when Barton had brought her in, all those years ago – the same casual lightness, staring down a younger softer Agent May across a briefing table.

A lot of things have changed since then. A lot of things have broken. But Romanoff can still cross her arms without looking defensive, and May can still see through the studied comfort in her limbs, and they are still women the rest of the world fears, and they can still meet each other’s eyes. 

“It’s been a while for us, hasn’t it?” says Romanoff, eyes soft.

“Yes,” says May. “You still owe me for the last time.”

Romanoff’s smile tucks itself in at a corner, laughter caught in the twist. “I haven’t forgotten.”

She unfolds her arms, slings a bag off her shoulder and onto the table in front of her. Dips her hands inside and pulls out four bottles:  one scotch, one whiskey, two vodkas. May raises an eyebrow.

“If I recall correctly,” she says, “you owed me _six_.”

“These are from Tony Stark’s personal stash.”

May raises her other eyebrow. “Does he know you have them?”

“Not yet,” says Romanoff, and her smile has grown to a full-blown grin, and her grin is absolutely _wicked_.

May considers this for a moment. She also considers the last op she’d run that had involved Tony Stark. It had also, if she remembers correctly, involved three blown covers, a pile of paperwork reaching from the floor up to her hip, and a slightly drunk man with a laughable goatee attempting to pick her up in the bar of her target’s hotel.

“Fine,” she says, and feels the tips of her lips kick slightly upwards.

Romanoff’s phone buzzes, loudly. She checks it quickly and sets it back down with an expression of glee.

“So, tonight?” she says, sliding the phone back in her pocket. “Say, seven o’clock?”

“I’ve got an op. Make it eight.”

“Done. I’ll bring the glasses.”

May nods. “I know a place,” she says, and reaches for the bottles.

Romanoff watches her, eyes sharp.  Her hands are in her pockets, her shoulders gently slouched. May’s got a cut on her hairline and a purpling bruise on her collarbone, just visible under the curve of her uniform. She taps the cap of the vodka bottle – good, strong Russian stuff, and looks up.

“It’s good to see you, Romanoff,” she says, and smiles.

Romanoff straightens, and her shoulders square, all the looseness bleeding out of her frame till she looks like she’s made of steel. May watches, and sees her relax.

A lot of things have changed, but this is the same. They do not lie to one another. 

“You too,” says Romanoff, and smiles back.

***

“Hey,” says a voice, “Ant-Man, right?,” and Scott turns around and dumps water all over the floor.

“Yeah!” he says. “Yeah. Scott, Scott Lang, you can just call me Scott.”

The owner of the voice, on closer inspection, is somewhat terrifying, though the look on his face is perfectly friendly; it’s probably the general air of competence and Scott’s painful awareness that everyone in these parts is a lot better at shooting people than he is that’s putting him on edge. He’d feel worse about that but, you know, _valid concern_.

He sticks out a hand, more or less at random. It’s dripping slightly. He switches hands.

The other man takes it, smiles a little. Shakes.

“I’m Mack,” he says. “Nice to meet you.” He retrieves his hand after a moment, tucking it in a pocket. “Sam told me you had a daughter.”

Scott looks down. There is, as expected, an open bottle of water lolling forlornly in a rapidly-growing puddle. He bends down gingerly, picks it up. The water is starting to soak into his shoes.

It’s sad, really – he could’ve used the water, his throat’s suddenly gone dry.

“Cassie,” says Scott, still looking down. He clears his throat. It doesn’t help. “She’s, you know, everything.”

Mack nods. He reaches behind him, grabs a fresh bottle off a shelf.

“Does she know?” asks Mack, handing the bottle over. “About what you do?”

This bottle’s got the SHIELD logo on the label. It’s pretty impressive, Scott thinks. Not exactly _smart_ , for a supposedly secret organisation, but, you know, cool. There’s a little eagle on the top of the cap and everything.

“Yeah,” Scott says. “Yeah, she does.”

He cracks the seal, takes a long drink.

“I like to think she’d be proud of me, you know? That she’d think her Daddy is a hero. Even if it means I have to be away from her.”

He smiles. It feels kind of tight, dishonest. That’s a bit unfair: he’s not lying, for a criminal he’s really an awful liar. But, well – there’s things you believe and things you believe, and he really does just want Cassie to be proud of him but he’d said that the last time, too. 

Mack watches him with sharp eyes, but after a bit he just nods again. “I get that.”

Scott takes a breath, takes another drink. It’s a little awkward, juggling two bottles, and his socks are getting wet. He wonders if there are any ants around here, in the middle of nowhere. Maybe they could get him new socks.

“Do you have family?” he asks, after a bit. “Or, I mean, you don’t have to – “

“A brother,” says Mack. Scott nods, closes his mouth; Mack smiles a little more. “My little brother. I never told him what I did. When he found out he was _not_ happy.”

“I’m sorry,” says Scott, and he is.

Mack shrugs. “It’s fine,” he says. “Was a while ago. We’re cool now.”

There’s a silence, which is, as silences tend to be, really _really_ awkward. Scott shuffles his feet a little, shifts his weight. Superheroes probably shouldn’t have nervous tics, but if he’s learned anything in these past few really shitty weeks it’s that saving the world once doesn’t really make you a superhero. He’s got a lot to learn, still. He’s making a list.

“You miss her?” asks Mack.

Scott blinks.

“Yeah.”

Mack chuckles, a little.

“Sorry, stupid question.” He sighs, rocks back on his heels. Scott isn’t sure if shady government agents should have nervous tics, either, but the fact that Mack _does_ is somewhat reassuring so he isn’t going to complain.

“Look,” says Mack, and Scott looks, meets Mack’s eyes. It feels important. “This life, it eats away at all the things outside it. Like friends, like family. You and I, we’re the lucky ones. We’ve still got something to protect.”

Scott swallows. “I know,” he says.

“I know you know,” says Mack, with a perfect Shady Government Agent Knows More Than You Do smirk, and Scott bursts out laughing. He takes a sip of water to cover it, chokes, and splutters for what feels like a full minute. Such, apparently, is life.

“How do you –“ he says, when he can breathe again, “are you ever afraid that you’ll lose him?”

“Of course I am. But,” says Mack, with a shrug, “I bet I’ve never been as scared as you are right now.”

“Not going to take that bet,” says Scott, dry as he can manage. Much drier than his socks, at any rate. “Thanks anyway.”

“Don’t blame you.”

Scott finishes the water. Mack watches him, hands in pockets, looking soft and puzzled and kind. There are a lot of kind people in the world, Scott knows. It’s something worth remembering. 

“But hey,” says Mack, as the moment passes. “Cassie’s Daddy is a superhero. I think she’ll be okay.”

“I am going to hug you right now,” says Scott. “Is that okay?”

Mack hesitates, then shrugs, shoulders loose. “Just don’t make a habit of it.”

***

Doctor Jemma Simmons, PhD, is, apparently, hard at work: pipette in hand, hovering over a flask full of green liquid; Bunsen burner lit, goggles on. She empties the pipette, stirs the mixture with a glass rod, places it over the burner. Peers at it; frowns.

“Hey, Jemma!” says the potted plant.

Jemma leaps nearly a foot into the air, nearly upsetting the flask. Nat grins from behind green leaves, and emerges, presenting herself to five feet of angry scientist with more of a flourish than it probably deserves.

“Oh my – Agent Romanoff!” says Jemma, glaring what she probably wishes were daggers. “You scared me!”

Nat grins wider.

“Perks of the job,” she says. “Still haven’t died of boredom, I see.”

“For your information,” huffs Jemma, “I happen to find my work very rewarding. And I happen to know for a _fact_ that were it not for my research the world would have ended on at least four separate occasions already – “

“Okay, okay,” says Nat, still grinning, and waits for Jemma to look less mortally offended before grabbing the pipette out of her hand, dropping it somewhat rudely on the bench, and pulling her into a hug.

It’s very difficult to maintain a scowl while being hugged by a trained assassin. Jemma tries valiantly anyway. Nat isn’t in the least perturbed; it is, after all, absolutely _adorable_.

“So you’re still at SHIELD,” she says, letting go, stepping back. She sticks her hands in her jacket pockets, lets the grin slip off her face. “I worried about you.”

Jemma blinks. “ _Me_?” she says, somewhat incredulous. “I’m not the one going around punching aliens in the face.”

She turns back to her test tubes, reaches for a pipette. Her goggles are slightly askew. When Nat first met her, guest teaching at the Academy, Jemma had been sixteen, soft, brutally intelligent. Glasses – she’d worn glasses then – a little crooked, constantly sliding down her nose. She’d blushed a lot, stammered a little, but her hands had never shaken, not once.

Not once that Nat had seen, anyway, and she had always made it her business to see a _lot_.

“Coulson died. You went off the grid,” Nat says, and shrugs. “Then SHIELD fell apart and I.”

She pauses, watches as Jemma’s shoulders stiffen. She understands. After SHIELD fell Wilson had handled Steve and Fury had handled the cleanup, and she had locked herself in a hotel room in Reno with Barton and read through the lists of the dead. 

“I worried about you,” says Natasha. Jemma nods.

“I can take care of myself,” she says, a small smile blooming across her cheeks. She sets the test tube down again, takes her goggles off. Looks up at Nat.

“I never doubted that,” Nat says, meeting her gaze. She smiles again, a softer gentler smile, lets herself be warm.

“You should have,” says Jemma, with a wry chuckle. “But then again, here I am. No cause for concern.”

There’s a new scar on Jemma’s wrist, just below her pulse point, tiny and puckered. New since Nat last saw her, anyway, lifetimes ago, running tests on Stark’s blood for her in the labs in the basement of the Triskelion. Nat’s cut her hair since then, let it grow again, curled it and straightened it and dyed it different shades of red. Of course there have been changes here too. They don’t surprise her.

She wishes, though. She’d like to know the story behind them.

She lets her eyes linger just a moment too long; Jemma catches her looking, flicks her own gaze away.

“So,” she says, “How’ve you been?”

“Alright,” says Nat, “Been better.” She pauses, shifts her weight onto her left foot. “Made a couple of stupid decisions.”

Jemma snorts. It gives Nat a rush of nostalgia.

“Yes,” says Jemma, rolling her eyes, “because it was _your_ decisions that were stupid.”

Nat shrugs, smiles, rueful and wry. “Well, I’m here, aren’t I?”

Jemma tilts her head, blinks. Searches, visibly, for something kind to say. For the _right thing_ to say, probably, by the way her eyes shift, the way she chews on her lips. Natasha, by contrast, has a dozen jokes on the tip of her tongue to lighten to mood: a third of them self-deprecating, the rest different levels of sardonic and sarcastic and cutting.

But there’s something warm and artlessly beautiful about the nervous way Jemma gnaws on her bottom lip, searching for comfort to give. Nat can’t help but admire it. It’s a good skill for anyone, knowing how to admire beautiful things. 

“Do you remember what I said to you,” she says, “back when you were at the Academy?”

Jemma blinks.

“You said a lot of things to me,” she says. She huffs a little at the memory, broadcasting irritation that’s largely undercut by her growing smile. “Granted, most of them involved guns and running and frankly offensive jokes at the expense of my research.”

Nat looks at her, silent and serious, and Jemma takes a breath and meets her eyes.

“I told you,” says Nat, “that you had a good heart.”

Jemma grins. “I believe the term you used was ‘ _bleeding’_.”

Nat laughs, sharp and clear. She remembers that, young Doctor Simmons waiting out hours-long incubation periods by hovering around the single training gym in the Science division, first aid kit at the ready. Field training was optional for scientists, but Nat had liked to teach them, liked their sharp minds and liked watching their nervous limbs gain muscle, liked watching them learn to handle the guns they built. She’d spotted Jemma then, for the first time: a mousy girl sitting on the bleachers, folding bandages.

She’d never managed to turn her into a fighter, but she had tried. She’d failed so infrequently at anything; this failure had never hurt as much as she’d thought it might.

“Still have it?” she asks.

Jemma cocks her head, lays her hands flat on her workbench. There are scars on the backs of her hands, too, thin silvery scratches. They still don’t shake.

Things change, Natasha knows. Things stay the same. The trick to surviving empires is knowing which is which.

“I suppose I do,” says Jemma, and Nat smiles.

“Good.”

She pulls her hands out of her pockets. Jemma goes back to her test tubes, goggles settling comfortably on the bridge of her nose. They stand in silence for a while, and then Nat sees: a bruise high on Jemma’s jaw, in a tender space where it curves down to meet her neck.

_Things change_ , she thinks, but this time it just makes her smile widen to a grin, wide and delighted.

“So,” she says, sly. “You and Fitz, then.”

Jemma turns bright pink. “Shut up!”

Nat remembers Fitz, too, a small curly-headed boy who’d buzzed around Jemma like a bee around a flower. Nat had liked him, in a distant sort of way. She’d once threatened to disembowel him if he ever tried anything funny.

It had been very subtle work, she thinks. It had been a conversation composed entirely of eye contact and facial twitches. But he’d gotten the message, loud and clear – he was, after all, a very smart boy.

“You finally got your act together, I see,” says Nat, and finds she’s actually glad to hear it. “It only took you, what, a _decade_?”

“Shut. _Up_ ,” groans Jemma. “I don’t know why I even put up with you.”

“Because I could kill you and everyone you love.”

Jemma scowls. It doesn’t last long.

“ _I_ could poison you in your sleep, you _cow_ ,” she says, but she’s grinning. 

***

The woman says: “They told me you were a sniper.”

He looks up. She’s standing in the doorway, feet planted, arms crossed. Watching him, not blinking. He brushes his hair away from his face; she cocks her head.

“Yeah,” he says. “That was a long time ago.”

“Do you remember it?” she asks. Her voice is cool, smooth, like the surface of a lake he saw once in a forest in Hungary. The question: like _do you know me?_ , like: _do you even remember them?_ – but, then again, not like either of them at all.                                           

He smiles; he tries. It comes out a bit more bitter than he was intending.

“Lady,” he says, “I remember a lot of things.”

His hand clenches, unclenches. There’s a small tremor in what used to be his trigger finger.

She smiles back. Just the twitch of her lips, but: a smile. It’s soft.

She says: “Not that.”

She blinks, just once. She says: “The stillness.”

“What?” he says. Genuine question. There are dead lands in his mind, but not many of them are still.

She takes a step towards him, another. Her steps are nearly silent – the nearly is a concession. He knows. He’d spent the last two years in soft tennis shoes, in old buildings, stepping loudly on every creaky step.

When she reaches him she crouches down, slowly, still looking him in the eye. Reaches out a hand, gestures towards his wrist. He frowns a little. She places her other hand on her knee, fingers slack, palm up.

“May I?” she says, and she waits, and he pauses, and he nods.

She rests her hand on his wrist, her thumb brushing light as a feather over his fluttering vein. After a moment, she draws his palm toward her own pulse, the slow steady thrum of it; after another, she lets go, pulls away.

“Your pulse is erratic. Your heart races when you’re afraid,” she says. Her face his serious, her voice firm and hard and kind. “You can’t have that. If you ever want to fire a gun accurately again, you’re going to have to learn to control it.”

He pictures a gun. In his mind it fits in his hand, perfect, an extension of the limb; it makes something inside him twist. He pictures _control_. The something twists harder.

“And if I don’t?” he says, but it’s rhetorical, really. He doesn’t.

“Then it will help you to sleep.”

She places her palms flat on her thighs, rises. Takes a breath. He can see it, her diaphragm rising, her chest filling, her shoulders rocking a small arc upwards and down. She takes another; he feels himself taking it with her, caught in the tide of the rhythm of it, the swell of a wave. Once, a long time ago, he’d lived near the ocean. He remembers.

She smiles again, the little soft twitch.

“Did they ever teach you tai chi?” she asks, and he laughs, sharp and surprised.

“No.”

“Then,” she says, and waits for him to stand, “watch carefully.”

She stands beside him, twists till her shoulders align with his, till he is watching the strong tidelines of her back like a mirror. She takes him through exercises, like this: arms up, back extended. Circular motions, fluid like water. All strength and no violence. She teaches him how to breathe.

He doesn’t ask her why. She doesn’t seem like the kind of woman who answers other people’s questions.

“I loved someone, once,” she says, after a while. Her left leg is raised, arms in front of her face, reaching slowly towards the sky. “He killed people. Innocent people.”    

Flinch.

“He wasn’t himself when he did it, but he was,” she says. Slowly, slowly, she settles her foot back on the ground. “And I hated him for it.”

He breathes. Chest expanding, eyes shut, lungs filling with salt air, the rhythm of the sea. She lifts her right arm, draws a wide arc, and he follows. Tracing the sky. He’d learned Mandarin, somehow, but he’d never spoken it.

She turns to face him, suddenly. The motion is fluid, like everything else, calm, but: suddenly. He starts. Blinks. Breathes.

“If he could have done what you did,” she says, “if he could have come back – I don’t know if I would have forgiven him.”

She looks him in the eye, like before. This time it feels deeper, tighter. The breath she takes is ragged, full of power, the rolling of a thunderstorm.

“But I would have wanted to,” she says, on the exhale. Tips her head, a little, to the left.

He looks at her. Watches her. Sees, with eyes sharp like hers: the calluses on both hands, from the sidearm she doesn’t carry. The twist in her mouth, beside her eyes, places where he feels himself tighten and pucker and flinch. The way she breathes, like the tides, like the moon, implacable. The way she breathes, like learned behaviour.

The way she’d asked him questions, soft and simple, the way she’d looked at his shaking fingers and seen his pulse instead. The way she looks at him, now, like she’s waiting, like she understands: what matters, what doesn’t. What he needs. How he breathes. What they lose. 

“What was his name?” he asks, and her eyes spark.

She smiles, a full curve, a shoreline, a wane moon. It’s still soft.

“His name was Andrew,” she says. “What’s yours?”

He smiles back, and this time it curls the way he wants it to.

He says: “Bucky.”

“Good to meet you, Bucky,” she says. “I’m Melinda.”

***

_“We break things,” says Daisy, and Wanda says, “Perhaps.”_

_She smiles. Her eyes are bright, brave, blazing._

_“So,” she says. “How do we get them back?”_

_Daisy looks up._


End file.
